Chapter 2: Mother Doll by Katya Apekina

We are an undifferentiated cloud. We are all dead and none of us have been able to move on. We talk at once. We are aggrieved. Our chatter is endless.

—Pardon, excuse me, pardon me.

—During the war the things that would pass for caviar, grainy, thick-skinned rubbery balls, some kind of industrial by-product! . . .

—My life was a series of misunderstandings, and my death too. Clumsy misunderstandings, this was my organizing principle.

Sometimes, piles of zygotes and embryos, big and small, pulled out by the root, show up and then we dig holes with our collective claws, and plant them back into the ground. Can we bury ourselves back into the earth? Can you bury a cloud with dirt? And who would want this? We do not want this.

—Obviously, it was the work of many men like me, but together we short-circuited entire Soviet apartment buildings. The key was to organize.

—Why are there so many Russians here? Do we get grouped together by language? By character flaws?

—Speak for yourself, character flaws!

—Do we share a defect of national character? Are there other outposts of French and Germans?

—I am French. I was born in Russe, but I was really Français. In my soul.

—Sounds unlikely.

—Where is the tsarina? She was in here earlier.

—So young, such a tragedy.

—She must have evolved past all this. It’s only natural that she wouldn’t be here very long.

—And the oysters during the war, they were no good at all. What were they contaminated with? They were orange and green. Fry them up and serve them, but they tasted terrible. They tasted like heavy metals. Maybe they were barnacles stuck to the bottoms of submarines.

—Gorge on pineapple, chomp on grouse, your days are numbered, bourgeois louse!

—The pineapple! Now, the pineapple was always very good if you could get it.

—There was really a tsarina here?

—She added a certain something to the group, certainly.

—You would think so.

—Why even in death do I feel like I am on an overcrowded subway train? Some air. I need some air. Where am I?

—The tsarina was never here. Give me a break. None of the tsarinas were ever really tsarinas. You think because we’re dead we stop lying? Maybe if any of you told the truth for once in your goddamn lives, you wouldn’t be in here.

—Speak for yourself. Lying was never my problem.

—Pardon, pardon, where am I?

—If we all move together . . . This way . . . No, this way . . . You’re pulling us. Keep moving and we’ll get somewhere. There are apartment buildings we could be short-circuiting right now.

—Stop tugging on me. Who is tugging on me? I need some space. I can’t catch a breath in here.

—You don’t need a breath. You’re dead. All that’s left of you is your hysteria, free-floating.

Sometimes, a flame emerges, and inside of it, an object. An offering by a living person sent to us, usually in error. Some of the objects are mysterious, others familiar but completely useless:

A phone with all of its buttons melted together.

Piles of foreign currency that we can’t buy anything with. It mildews quickly and disintegrates.

A convertible with no gasoline, but pushed by the force of our wills, in circles, rusting in our atmosphere of gaseous tears.

And sometimes, but this is not often, a person will come from the other side, usually on a hired errand.

“Hello? Hello? Coco? Coco? Can you hear me?” A distant voice, not our own. It is apart, and yet inside of our cloud. It causes us all to ripple. It exists on another plane and dimension and yet is somehow audible to us.

From our cloud emerge five Pomeranians, translucent like jellyfish, all responding to the name of Coco. Where have they come from? They pant and nip at the ankles of the man. A silhouette in our midst. A solid tree of meat.

—Excuse me. Excuse me. Sir? Madam? Sir. Excuse me. You!

—He can’t hear us. They pay him to find their dogs.

—Who does?

—The people whose dogs died.

“Coco! Coco! Which one of you is Coco?” the man asks the dogs. He crouches and pets them all, looks at their translucent bodies for the indicated markings—a patch on a paw, a sly look, a slightly crooked tail that points right. These clues are sometimes helpful, sometimes not. Another Pomeranian emerges, but this one is the size of a couch.

—Sir!

—He can’t hear you, I told you. You broads never listen.

—Sir! Sir!

—Quit tugging on us.

—Ironic this Communist revolutionary can’t cooperate with the rest of us. Her needs, her needs. They were all like that. Liars.

—Listen, if you were so perfect you wouldn’t be here, okay.

—Where would I be then?

—Wherever the others are sent.

—Nobody is sent anywhere.

—We are all just the remaining garbage. The best we can hope for is to get dissolved.

—What is in that for me, might I ask you? Why would I want such an outcome?

—You wouldn’t. Clearly. That’s why you’re here.

—You’re here too, might I remind you.

—Sir! Sir!!!!

The man looks up. What was that? A sense of movement in the fog? It has taken him a while to get here. Perhaps he is not even in the right place. All these Pomeranians seem to be named Coco.

—Sir!!!! Excuse me!!

“Hello?” he says uncertainly.

It is very cold here. The dogs are nipping at his pants legs, chewing on the shoelaces of his sneakers. Ghostly little fox jaws snapping inside puffs of fur. The large one circles him twice, then begins to lick his neck, leaving something viscous on his skin that freezes in crusts almost immediately. Ghosts look like the dead’s own self-conception, so why is this Coco so large? Is it the most loved? Or does it just have the most inflated self-regard?

He hears the sound again. Faintly, but this time unmistakably, “Sir!”

He stops petting the dogs, stands up, shivering.

A girl tumbles toward him out of the mist. She looks about sixteen.

“Do you see me?” the girl says. “Can you hear me?” There is a slight accent warbling underneath her mid-Atlantic English.

“Yes,” the man says. The girl is wearing a pleated gray wool dress with a white pinafore and lace collar. A school uniform. There has been a clear struggle for her to get out of wherever she’d been hiding. Her braid is undone on one side, and she’s missing a boot. The sleeve on her dress is torn, shredded, as if by claws.

She takes his wrist. “Help me. Please.”

The man was warned many years ago by his teacher at the Institute that you should remain open to the gifts of the dead but also that you must not overstay your time there. Time is an elastic concept in the afterlife, and really on earth too if you know how to work with it, but bodies conform to rules of gravity and you must always prioritize and care for them because crossing into other realms taps the body’s resources.

The part of his wrist that the girl is holding has gone numb, as though a nerve were pinched in his back.

“How do I leave here?” she asks.

“Do you know that you’re dead?” Some of the spirits he has talked to do not. Or rather, they know but they don’t. This type of self-deception exists even in death.

She nods vaguely. “Of course.”

“Can I help you find peace?” he asks her, loosening her grip on his wrist and beckoning to the largest Pomeranian. The dog ambles over to them, then stands there like a table. The girl runs her hand through its fur, in both directions, lost in thought.

The man wraps his arms around the dog and lifts it by the armpits. The dog does not seem to mind this at all. It blinks and pants as the man whispers something in its ear. A message relayed from the owner. The dog begins to fade, its twitching tail disappearing last.

“I think all ghosts are looking for peace,” the man tells the girl, wiping his hands on his knees when he’s done.

The other dogs do not know what to make of what happened to Big Coco. One begins howling; the others bark apoplectically.

The girl does not seem to notice any of this. She brings her hand up to her jaw and nods vaguely. “I don’t think it is possible. Peace. After what I’ve done.”

The man nods. “What did you do?”

“Oh, it’s horrible.” They stare at each other. He’s been doing this for a while and this is the farthest he has wandered. It’s very cold here. He clenches his jaw to stop his teeth from chattering.

The girl takes the man’s hands and wraps them around her translucent waist. “Will you help me disappear like that?” she asks, staring into his eyes. “If I tell you everything, will you help me?”

A dog faithfully awaiting instructions from its master—this is one thing. They can be released fairly easily. People are trickier.

“I’ll try. Sure,” he says. “Is there someone who needs to see you and hear you? Someone from whom you need forgiveness?”

She gives a small nod. “But she’s no longer there. She’s not dead exactly, but she’s gone.”

Yes. There’s standard protocol for this. “Does she have descendants? Usually these things get carried from one generation to the next. And of course, whoever it is has to be open to this sort of thing. Some people are and some people aren’t.”

Another nod. Her eyes are clear and gray and when they lock onto his, they immediately give him a feeling of connecting to the infinite. Something in him dilates. It’s a slightly uncomfortable sensation that can still be reframed as pleasurable.

“You died young?” he asks.

She squints, trying to remember. “In a sense, yes. But, no,” she says carefully. “I died at ninety-six on Long Island. But by then it wasn’t me who died. That woman has made all her necessary amends. That woman I don’t think is here. She’s dissolved, reincarnated, whatever else happens. But I am the part of her that she never successfully buried. She cordoned me off from the rest of herself, from her new family. I’m her true self. Though, she would have probably said she was just as true as me. And she wouldn’t have been wrong.”

As she looks at him, he can feel something of hers moving through him and this makes him shake. Is it with excitement, fear, or simply exertion? It’s taking a lot of effort to keep himself here.

“Will you come back for me?” she asks.

Her sad gray eyes, just the thought of them, will make him start shaking violently again for days to come.

“Yes,” he says, but he is already going, gone. Filled with the sensation of falling backward out of the portal he’d managed to find and pry open for the length of his visit.